What Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite platform could mean for future Android smartphones

Processors aren’t the sexiest of topics out there, but they are important. Fundamental in fact. Without them, your phone, smartwatch, headphones, laptop and pretty much every other technology device you use, would be redundant. 

There’s a chance you will have no idea what processor – or platform as they are known as these days – is powering your phone or your laptop, and that’s fair enough. Why should you? You just want your device to work properly and do everything you want it to do quickly, right?

The platform that runs your devices opens the doors to many of the features and functions that your phone, tablet or laptop is able to do though. Take the Apple iPhone 16 series as an example. These phones run on Apple’s A18 platform, which in turn allows for the support of Apple Intelligence. 

For Android devices, a good number run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, from Samsung and Xiaomi to OnePlus and Honor. For Samsung, its Galaxy S24 series, Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Galaxy Z Fold 6 all run on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, while wearables like Google’s Pixel Watch 3 run on the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 platform. There’s also a chance even your car has a Snapdragon platform somewhere inside, depending on what you drive. Add all that up and you can see how they are worth taking about. 

Every year, Qualcomm announces its next-generation Snapdragon platform for mobile, and with that, performance gains are made possible, along with battery improvements and new features that Qualcomm’s partners can choose to put into their flagship devices using the platform.

What you need to know about the Snapdragon 8 Elite

For 2024, Qualcomm changed the naming of its mobile platform. Announced at Snapdragon Summit, the new platform is called the Snapdragon 8 Elite rather than Snapdragon 8 Gen 4. Qualcomm wouldn’t answer what the 2nd generation of the platform would be called, but try not to confuse it with the Snapdragon X Elite, which is the platform used in some of the latest AI PC laptops. 

The Snapdragon 8 Elite is the company’s first mobile platform to feature the next generation custom Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU and enhanced Qualcomm Hexagon NPU. What on earth does that mean in reality? Well, Qualcomm claims the new platform will offer power savings of 27 per cent so your next Android phone could offer significantly better battery life. 

It will also allow for on-device multi-modal generative AI applications, which means your next Android phone would be able to pull in data from multiple different sources simultaneously, including voice and audio, text and touch, photos, and vision without talking to the cloud. It will then be able to use that information to deliver helpful responses through elements like your phone’s calendar, location, news, weather and contacts. Other experiences including camera capabilities, gaming and web browsing are also enhanced thanks to those technologies. 

There was a lot of discussion around on-device AI during the Summit, with several speakers at Qualcomm’s event suggesting the large language models (LLMs) have become considerably smaller and more powerful than previously (even those from a year ago) enabling them to do more from a smaller footprint, which in turn could see things like ChatGPT running on device rather than requiring cloud access. That would mean AI could do more even when you’re offline. 

Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of mobile handsets at Qualcomm Technologies, said: “With leading CPU, GPU and NPU capabilities, the Snapdragon 8 Elite delivers dramatic performance enhancements and power efficiency.”

He added: “It revolutionises mobile experiences by offering personalised, multi-modal generative AI directly on the device enabling the understanding of speech, context, and images to enhance everything from productivity to creativity tasks while prioritising user privacy.”

During a Q&A at the Snapdragon Summit, Patrick also explained to me a couple of use cases where devices running the Snapdragon 8 Elite could offer benefits over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. He said that “gaming is one. It’s something that really pushes a smartphone chip to its limit”. 

But he also told me: “From experiences we’ve had so far testing Oryon, we see something in those experiences – [they are] effortless. Just there’s no lag. That feeling kind of goes away. The device isn’t heating up anymore and there’s ridiculous levels of detail. So, that’s pretty compelling.”

He also talked about web browsing and how that would be something users of the upcoming smartphones running on Snapdragon 8 Elite would see improvements in. “Web browsing, in a way can seem old fashioned. But in the end, that’s what people do with phones, right? Consume web pages and interact with web pages. There’s the mobile version and then the desktop version. And partly they’ve conditioned that because they know, phones have been powerful, but not that powerful.”

“What we’re gonna see is once we get to this Elite class of processor, you don’t need the mobile version anymore, even the more complex, more heavy, more feature rich desktop version, will continue to feel effortless. The device will not struggle to load it. Those same the same web engines are what is in fact, at the heart of many, many applications. So we see many applications that you run that used to be accepting some of limitation now will be snappy, will be responsive and that will make a big impact.”

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite specs

To get geeky just for a second, I’ll run through the architecture of the Snapdragon 8 Elite, though I do believe it should be more about what that means for you and your device, rather than a numbers game and benchmark scores.

Still, the Snapdragon 8 Elite runs on a 3nm process with 64-bit architecture, compared to the 4nm process the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 ran on. The configuration has changed too, with no efficiency cores anymore and instead, performance cores up to 3.53GHz and a prime core up to 4.32GHz. 

All that is claimed to mean a 45 per cent single core improvement, 45 per cent multi-core improvement and 62 per cent web browsing improvement. Elsewhere, Qualcomm claims the 8 Elite will offer a 44 per cent CPU power saving and 40 per cent GPU power saving, which is said to translate to that 27 per cent overall system on chip power improvement I mentioned earlier. 

For gaming there is said to be a 40 per cent performance improvement, 35 per cent ray tracing improvement, while camera performance is said to offer a 33 per cent through-put improvement over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. There’s also a new AI Pet Suite available and Video Magic Eraser.

Of course this is simply what Qualcomm has tested for its new platform, and it will very much depend on individual manufacturers and their devices to put the new hardware to work – but if you get close to 30 per cent extra battery life from your Android smartphone next year, even that would be significant.

Which devices will run on the Snapdragon 8 Elite?

During the Snapdragon Summit, Xiaomi Series 13 was confirmed to be the first device to launch on the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and Honor confirmed the Magic 7 would also run on the platform.

Other manufacturers including Samsung, Xiaomi, ASUS, OnePlus, Oppo, RealMe, Vivo and iQOO are all “poised” to launch devices running on the platform in the coming months.